


Old Language

by jmandrake



Category: Nancy Drew (Video Games)
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, Miserable Angst, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-14
Updated: 2016-03-14
Packaged: 2018-05-26 15:18:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6244861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jmandrake/pseuds/jmandrake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Henrik can't forget Sonny, not ever. He just has trouble putting him into words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Old Language

Henrik has two stories he tells about Sonny Joon. 

He tests out the first when Sonny’s replacement arrives, a bright, competent young woman with fiery hair who makes it her business to know everything. She wants to hear what it’s like to reach into stone and pull old language free, to peer at glyphs until they start to swim out at you—once they decide you’re ready to hear what they have to say. When he tries to explain it, the words go sideways, like they always do. He’s been talking to Pacal for too long. 

But she seems to understand, if not the precise feeling then the drive behind it. She tells him she likes to put puzzles together too. She finds things no one has discovered yet, valuable things buried in the dirt, in the floorboards of old houses. She’s a smuggler’s dream, he thinks—but for her, it’s an altruistic mission. She’s no treasure hunter, no graverobber. She just wants to help people find things they've lost.

She reminds him of Sonny. Henrik doesn’t dwell on the connection, just lets it slide into a distant corner of his mind. 

On her first day, she spins her chair around to look at him, head cocked to one side. “Did you know the deputy curator who was here before me?”

And in this, she’s nothing like Sonny at all. He would never stare at Henrik with anything like this girl’s clear-eyed focus. In anyone else, her attention would be unnerving, but her smile is just patient, curious. 

He doesn’t question her sudden interest in Sonny. It could have come from anywhere: from the bubbles of candy wrappers Henrik can’t yet bring himself to throw out, the elaborate pen doodles of monkeys and cows Sonny scribbled on some of the doorknobs, the number-tile facsimiles he scattered all over the museum. All baffling, all infuriating. Henrik thinks about Sonny lifting something priceless and letting it slip through his clumsy fingers, and it gives him a healthy burst of anger, something that will help him put the story to words. 

“Hurricane Sonny?” At his tone, the new girl’s eyebrows shoot up. Henrik is glad his mask still hides his face. Somehow, he thinks she would know that his grimace isn’t quite real, that just saying Sonny's _name_ is more painful than it ought to be. She’d see right through him. Henrik pretends Sonny Joon is everything he should have been, lazy and incompetent and completely, utterly forgettable. He steels the words in his mind until they’re hard and flat—and he begins. “I’m afraid I did . . .”

~

The second story is much, much different. 

He has no one to tell it to, for one thing. The person he most wants to hear it is long gone. He knows the separation is permanent, though he can’t say exactly why. Just a feeling. He’s learned to trust the twist in his gut, which is how he knows he has to move fast to protect Pacal, get him out of his glass case where he’s most vulnerable. It’s how he stayed ahead of border officials in his smuggling days. He’d almost lost the instinct, the sudden urge to _move_ , but he’s seen that same need in Sonny’s eyes and remembered it. It’s the hunger for distance, premeditated. Getting far before anyone has the chance to get close. 

Henrik should have recognized it earlier. 

He can’t talk to Sonny anymore, but he’s gotten his HAM radio out again, and he’s been sending messages out into the void. Not messages that he expects a response to, just phrases that keep rocketing around in his head. Sometimes he types them out in Yucatec, the words of the modern Maya.

 _Tene tin na’atik_ , he types. _I understand._

Languages have always slid around in his brain, merging into one another. Spanish to German to Yucatec to . . . Korean. The last one is new, and he only knows a little. He fills in the gaps with glyphs, pictures where the sounds should go.

That’s the other problem with this story—he doesn’t know what language to use. The first story—the awful one with an acid bite, the one Beech Hill told Sonny every day he was here—sounds best in English. _Scatterbrain, screw-up, worthless._ Every word makes him wince. 

But the second story? Henrik doesn’t even think he’s managed to tell it to himself yet.

~

The second story has nothing to do with the first time he saw Sonny (green hair, shoes that squeaked with every step) or all those days of barely avoided disasters (Henrik holding Sonny around the knees while he leaned into the dumpster, fishing for Henrik’s monolith notes; driving Sonny up and down the parking garage until they found his car) or even anything to do with aliens (which is surprising, in retrospect). He supposes all those things must have been building up to something, he just didn’t know it at the time.

For him, the second story starts in a rush, on the day Sonny tells him about his grandfather. They are both wearing face masks and latex gloves, brushing dust off two urns from Chichen Itza. As Henrik swirls his brush over a sculpted hand, Sonny tells him his grandfather got him through a childhood illness (“it was a brush with death sort of thing,” Sonny says, casual) and then he's off again about the time he tried to work as a shoeshiner in a country club. It startles Henrik, the word “death” so close to Sonny Joon, this boy who, for all his faults, is so full of life that it’s blinding. Henrik cannot imagine it, a world where Sonny died before he could become _this_ , before he had the chance to end up here, rapt as Henrik teaches him a new Mayan glyph or the proper way to handle cloth artifacts. Henrik can’t see Sonny’s smile behind the mask, but he misses it suddenly, with a keenness he can’t name. 

“You’ve stopped,” Sonny says. Henrik’s hands are still; he hadn’t noticed. He coughs softly. 

“I just hadn’t thought of you as having a family, Sonny,” he says, brush at work again. “I nearly believed you’d just . . . hatched into the world somehow.”

There it is—the grin. The crinkles around his eyes. His joy can be so infectious. “You mean you didn’t?”

Henrik snorts. “Not quite.”

“That’s what they _want_ you to think. But we’re probably both egg-babies. Look.” Sonny taps his white mask, laughs. “We’re still wearing our shells.”

Henrik smiles at that. Everything Sonny says sounds like nonsense at first, but Henrik has come to appreciate his odd brand of humor. It’s just the way he thinks—always half out of reality, never quite content with the world as it is. He’s somehow always serious and always . . . not. Sonny’s jokes, as far as Henrik can tell, all have some truth buried in them somewhere, and even Sonny doesn’t know how to separate the two. 

“Do _you_ have a family?” Sonny says. He’s leaning in now, curious. “Kids or anything?”

“No. Just divorced, a long time ago.” Henrik chips with the side of his brush on a stubborn clod of dirt. He barely thinks about the divorce most days. It was an amicable parting. There wasn’t any trauma. What was worse were the years and years of coming home to empty rooms, the days when Henrik didn’t speak to a human soul that wasn’t a thousand years dead. It was just so hard to shift gears; he spent hours trying to unravel rules of an ancient code of etiquette and then forgot how to say hello to people. It was strange, isolating. Even being married hadn’t gotten rid of the feeling.

That’s why here, now, he feels better than he has in a long time. Sonny is a disaster most days, but he doesn’t mind when Henrik trails off, murmuring to himself in a language Sonny doesn’t understand. In fact, he’s curious, always wants to hear more. He’s so different from anyone Henrik has ever met. 

It makes sense—after all, Sonny _himself_ is a language no one understands. 

Henrik wants to learn it. 

When Henrik looks up, Sonny has moved even closer, his eyes locked on Henrik’s. His mask is hanging loose from his ears. The grin is back, bright and electric. It’s a marvel, really—brilliant enough to make you believe in things you have no business believing in. Henrik stares at it, and it’s not until Sonny gives a little sigh that he realizes he hasn’t quite been breathing regularly. 

“Now, who on earth would give _you_ up?” Sonny says with a wink. Henrik’s brush slides off the urn entirely, running off into empty air. He never gets any words back. He clears his throat and . . . nothing. His brain has emptied into a strange, new kind of clarity.

Sonny’s eyes are on his work again. He hums to himself. Henrik’s mind is already fixing this moment in his memory, quite against his will—the soft sound of the brushes, Sonny’s arm close to his. He doesn’t know all the details right away; they’ll only come to him later, once he identifies the strange, exuberant charge that runs through him when Sonny speaks.

“Well then, don’t worry,” Sonny says suddenly, his voice quiet. His mouth lifts in a kind smile, and Henrik’s face is hot under his mask. “I’m family. Right here.” 

All Henrik can do is nod. 

~

Weeks pass before it settles in his chest, horrific, insistent, stupid. Sonny’s smile and the affection that goes with it. A distinct, traitorous thump in Henrik’s heart every time Sonny looks at him. If there’s a voice anywhere warning him away, he doesn’t hear. It’s already got its claws in him. He works late, and when Sonny leaves, Henrik sinks against his desk, arms curling around his head.

He can’t give it a name. The Maya never had a god of love. 

~

He considers giving Joanna his resignation. He’s working up to it, his hand on the doorknob of the lab, when Sonny comes to stand beside him, completely silent for once. Henrik wonders if his thoughts have been loud enough for Sonny to notice. _Ignore me_ , he wants to say. _I’m old and lonely and you’re . . . you’re infuriating and important and sweet, and I can make myself get over it for your sake. I’m sorry if I’ve bothered you._

Sonny shocks him, as always—slowly, tenderly, he loops his arm through Henrik’s and kisses him on the shoulder.

“Sonny . . .” Henrik braces his hand against the door. “Don’t—”

“That was a serious moment,” Sonny says. His head rests against Henrik’s arm—from above his hair looks mostly blue, dulled from the last dye job. “I only give out like five of those a year, so you’d better savor it.”

Henrik looks down at his feet. He feels any moral ground slip out from under him. “Can I drive you home?” he mumbles.

“I’d be delighted, Mr. Van der Hune,” Sonny says. He grins up at him, and Henrik feels fleetingly happy. “If you can tell me where the hell that is.” 

~

Sonny has problems with the word “home.” He talks about it like it doesn’t exist, which is funny, considering he genuinely thinks aliens have a plan for his future. Mostly, though, he doesn’t talk about it at all. This should worry Henrik, but there are a lot of things he doesn’t worry about when Sonny’s around.

~

Sonny has had an absurd number of jobs in an absurd number of towns, and Henrik has never once heard him mention anyone who populated them. Apart from the bit about his grandfather, his whole life is a blank. 

Henrik tries to learn more, feeds him questions during the quieter moments in the lab. Where was he born? Where has he lived? Will he ever go back? Does he have any close friends? 

Sonny never answers him directly. He either jokes about it or goes eerily quiet. When Henrik asks that last question, Sonny is sitting on the other side of Henrik’s desk, pen in hand as he sketches calendar glyphs on a sheet of notebook paper. 

“Not really,” Sonny says. He presses his face close to the paper, cross-hatching one of the symbols. 

“I don’t believe you,” Henrik says. 

“You don’t believe in a lot of things.” Sonny lifts his head for a quick flash of a smile. He drops his hand and reaches lazily across the table, rolling his pen over Henrik’s knuckles. This is how it goes. They touch, but never directly. Even now, the feel of Sonny’s fingertips skating over his skin is . . . well, _alien_. 

Henrik scoffs. “Even the Annunaki are less of a stretch than Sonny Joon not having friends.” 

Something sinks in Sonny’s eyes, and he stays quiet. Henrik’s stomach drops. Sonny Joon has lit a fire in him, but he doesn’t see it in himself. If Henrik could only give it back to him somehow, if he could find just the right words to convince him. . . . For a moment, he feels dizzy, trapped behind the same old frantic silence, trying to work out the basics of speech.

“Let’s not talk about it,” Sonny finally says. He smiles, leans over the desk, and plants a chaste peck on Henrik’s nose through his mask. It’s like hypnotism, what he’s doing, and Henrik is helpless. 

~

They have a huge fight about how we keep _both_ hands on priceless pottery when we’re carrying it around. Sonny says nothing happened, that Henrik is blowing it out of proportion. Henrik calls him careless and irresponsible. Et cetera. When Sonny stops responding, Henrik hisses, “ _Why_ are you _here_?” 

The look on Sonny’s face cuts him to the bone. 

They don’t speak for the rest of the day, and Henrik hardly sleeps. In the morning, he is ready to apologize, beg forgiveness if he has to, but Sonny isn’t there when he gets to the lab. He has a moment of panic before he sees the note, neatly folded on Henrik’s desk.

 ** _Why I’m Here_** is written along the top in Sonny’s blocky handwriting, as if he’s delivering Henrik an essay on the topic. Henrik smiles to himself, and then his eyes drop to the only other thing on the page. A single glyph, the syllabic for ‘u.’ 

The page blurs in Henrik’s hands. 

Sonny comes in five minutes later, his glasses sliding just far enough down his nose so he doesn’t have to look Henrik in the eye. Henrik doesn’t say anything, just walks up to him and scoops him into his arms. Sonny has to stretch up on his toes to hug him back, and Henrik buries his face in Sonny’s shoulder and _needs_ this boy, needs him until he feels the room start to spin.

They break apart when they hear Joanna’s footsteps down the hall. The distance is already more than Henrik can stand.

~

Their first real kiss happens on the last day Henrik ever sees him.

He doesn’t know it at the time. He doesn’t know Sonny has already given a two-week notice, that he’s already explained to Joanna that he can’t stay, that he has places to go, more to do. That it’s important. Henrik desperately wants to believe this, but Sonny doesn’t need an important reason to run. It’s just what he does. Henrik understands that now. 

It’s after five. Sonny waits for him at the lab door. When Henrik comes close, Sonny pulls his shirt collar and teases him down until their lips touch. It is slow and sweet and Sonny’s glasses bump against his nose and Henrik smoothes a hand over Sonny’s ear and he has never fallen asleep since without remembering the weight of Sonny’s body against his. He is miserably happy, and when the kiss stops, Sonny smiles crookedly up at him. 

“See you tomorrow.”

~

It’s been a year. Sonny is gone and so is Nancy and so is the monolith. Henrik lost his memory and then got it back and he wishes the hollow Sonny left was enough to warrant concerned doctors poking around in his head. 

In the hospital, they say he spoke sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in Mayan dialects. He said _dol-awa_ , which meant “come back” in Korean. He drew a boy with wild hair and glasses being lifted into the sky. 

His stories are all tangled together now. He’ll never be sure if he’s remembering it all. 

But when he types bits of it into the HAM radio, he always begins with a warning. Something he’s been trying to make himself understand—about the way his heart turned over and over around him, the way loneliness festered on them both like an open wound. How can he describe it? How do we learn to read someone, to tell them what we mean?

 _Jun t'aan ma'u tsook t'aano'obi_ , he types.

_One language is never enough._


End file.
